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Clear your recently used documents on exiting Windows 7

By default, Windows 7 will keep a list of the recently used documents in the jump lists on the Start menu, and, if you have enabled it, on the Recent Documents menu too. This means that other users of your PC can see the documents and files that you have been working on – far from ideal from a security perspective. If you have Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate you can force Windows to clear the recently used documents from the Start menu every time you log off your PC, by applying a Group Policy as follows:

1. Press [Windows Key] + [R], type GPEDIT and click OK.

2. Navigate to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar.

3. Double-click Clear history of recently opened documents on exit and from the window that opens select Enabled, then click OK.

4. Close the Group Policy Editor.

Speed-up Windows 7 taskbar for faster access

The Windows 7 taskbar is a great improvement on the more basic taskbar in older Windows versions, but it still has some problems. While the thumbnail view allows you to quickly switch between open windows, there is still a delay between hovering over the icon and the thumbnails being displayed. However, with a quick tweak of the registry you can remove the pause before the thumbnails are displayed. Before applying the tweak backup your registry following the steps in article R 11 of your main Windows Advisor manual, or here: http://www.windowsadvisor.co.uk/reg_backup.html

With the backup in place, proceed as follows:

1. Press [Windows Key] + [R], type REGEDIT and click OK.

2. Navigate to the registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\​Software\​Microsoft\​Windows\​CurrentVersion\​Explorer\​Advanced

3. Right-click in a blank area of the right-hand panel and then click New > DWORD Value. Name the new value ExtendedUIHoverTime.

4. Double-click on ExtendedUIHoverTime and enter 1 in the Value data field then click OK.

Close the Registry Editor and restart your PC for the changes to take effect.

Windows 7 Backup Not Up to the Job

Internet forums are awash with complaints over the backup system included with Windows 7. Users’ gripes range from the amount of time a simple backup takes to the fact that the whole backup process starts again if Windows is shut down part way through. One user has reported Windows taking over 48 hours to back up just 23% of a 900GB disk, a data transfer rate of just 1.2Mb/sec, around 10 times slower than the average broadband connection). Switching from the Windows default to a third-party backup tool, the same user was able to backup his entire system in just 6 hours. Other users have reported finding the Windows 7 backup tool 14 times slower than the standard Windows copy command when transferring data to an external USB hard disk.

Backing up your data is essential, but it looks like, at the moment at least, the built-in Windows 7 backup tool is not up to the job. In Windows Advisor article B 8 – ‘Backup: Ultimate Guide to Securing Essential Data’ - we show you how you can safely and securely backup your Windows system using great free tools, meaning that if you ever do lose an important piece of data, or worse still your whole system crashes, you’ll be able to get things back to normal with minimum fuss. If you’re not currently subscribed to the Windows Advisor, click here.

Windows 7 Service Pack 1 on the Way

Windows 7 may only have been released just over 6 months ago, but Microsoft are already planning on releasing the first service pack update to their latest operating system. Due at the end of July, Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows 7 won't feature any revolutionary changes to the operating system, instead just providing a collection of all of the security updates and bug fixes released so far via the Windows Update service. So if all of the fixes in SP1 are already available, why are Microsoft bothering to release it? The answer is down to their biggest customers, corporate users.

Microsoft desperately want corporate users to migrate their desktops to Windows 7, especially since many avoided Windows Vista and stuck with XP. But corporate customers are very conservative, usually waiting until all of the bugs have been ironed out of a new Windows version, meaning that they usually won't deploy a Windows version until after the first service pack release. Microsoft have told their corporate customers that there is no need to wait to deploy Windows 7, but many are still waiting for the psychological milestone of SP1 to be released.

If you are thinking of upgrading to Windows 7, the release of SP1 means there has never been a better time. You can find out everything you need to know about using Windows 7 in article W 71 – ‘Windows 7: Essential Steps for an Error-free Installation’. If you’re not currently subscribed to the Windows Advisor, click here.

Clean your Windows 7 boot menu for a more simple startup

If you’ve upgraded your system to Windows 7, you may find that you are presented with a menu as you boot up, asking you to choose between a number of different operating systems – perhaps even the previous version of Windows installed on your system. If you’ve created a hard drive partition to test out other operating systems or older Windows versions, you will also find a number of other operating system entries in your boot menu. If you no longer use some of these different operating system entries, they can be safely be deleted as follows:

1. Click Start > All Programs > Accessories, right-click on Command Prompt and choose Run as administrator.

2. At the command prompt, type BCDEDIT followed by [Enter]. This will display a list of all of the entries in your Windows boot menu.

3. To remove an entry, type BCDEDIT /delete <identifier> followed by [Enter], where <identifier> is the identifier field listed next to the entry after typing the command in step 2.

4. Repeat step 3 to remove all unnecessary entries, then type EXIT followed by [Enter] to close the command prompt.

Use the Classic Theme in Windows 7 to boost performance

The Windows 7 theme does look good, but unfortunately this advanced look and feel does not come for free – it actually takes quite a bit of processor power, which could be put to better use. By switching from the Windows 7 default theme to the Windows Classic theme, you can revert your PC back to the old style Windows look and feel, and free-up valuable system resources to increase performance. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, type theme then click Change the theme.

2. Click Classic Theme. The Windows appearance will change to the basic Windows look and feel.

3. Close the Themes control panel.

Beware the fake Windows 7 compatibility checker

If you’re thinking of upgrading to Windows 7, you’ve probably come across the Windows 7 compatibility checker. It’s a small tool from Microsoft, which tests whether your PC hardware is capable of running the latest version of Windows. However, some hackers are trying to exploit people’s desire to upgrade to the latest Windows version with a Trojan horse infection disguised as the compatibility checker. The Trojan, which arrives in your inbox via an email, rather than being downloaded from the Microsoft website, implants a Trojan on your system, identified by the security company BitDefender as Trojan-Generic-3783603. This Trojan will open a back door to allow other malware to gain access to your PC.

Our advice is: if you receive any kind of email claiming to help you upgrade to Windows 7, or containing an attachment purporting to be the Windows 7 compatibility checker, then ignore it. The only place to get the genuine compatibility checker is the Microsoft website. You’ll find everything you need to know on upgrading to Windows 7 – including how to use the Windows 7 compatibility checker – in Windows Advisor article W71 - ‘Windows 7: Essential Steps for an Error-free Installation’.

Windows 7 set for Service Pack 1 release

Like all previous versions of Windows, Windows 7 is not without its flaws, and Microsoft regularly issues updates to fix problems. Now Microsoft are following the previous practice and collecting these updates together into a service pack for Windows 7, and have announced the contents of SP1 for Windows 7 (which was only released last October). It seems that the service pack will not contain any revolutionary changes to Windows 7, and apart from collecting together all of the updates issued so far in to a single package, SP1 will deliver an updated version of the Remote Desktop Client, and updates to the virtualization infrastructure. This is linked to another recent announcement by Microsoft on the ‘XP Mode’ feature of Windows 7, which allows you to run a full Windows XP system in a virtual PC environment, in order to run older software on Windows 7. The new system reduces the hardware requirements for XP Mode, meaning many more PCs will be able to run it.

The announcement of SP1 for Windows 7 seems to be part of Microsoft’s strategy to induce businesses to upgrade to the new operating system. Often large business customers will wait until most of a new operating systems bugs have been ironed out with a service pack release before deploying the operating system in their company. However, Microsoft are billing SP1 for Windows 7 as only a minor update, unlike SP2 for Windows XP for example which radically changed how many parts of the operating system worked. Their message is that SP1 isn’t really worth waiting for, so you might as well install Windows 7 now.

We’ll bring you the latest developments on SP1 for Windows 7 as they happen.

Recover individual files using System Restore in Windows 7

System Restore in Windows 7 is extremely useful if you need to recover a failed Windows system, but it also comes in handy if you need to restore a single file to an earlier version, because it was accidentally deleted or changed for example. If you need to recover a single file from a restore point, follow these steps:

1. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the folder containing the file you want to restore.

2. Right-click on the file and choose Restore previous versions. If you have accidentally deleted the file, right-click on the folder that contained it instead.

3. A list of the previous versions of the file will be displayed, along with the date that the copies were made. Select the version of the file or folder that you would like to restore.

4. Click either Restore to replace the existing version of the file or folder, or Copy to create a copy of the old version of the file or folder on your main hard disk.

Cure sound problems when playing back videos in Windows 7

If you’ve tried to play back movie files on your Windows 7 machine but find that there is no sound, or that the sound playback is corrupt and crackly, it is likely that your sound playback settings are not optimized for video playback. Fortunately, you can correct this with a few simple mouse clicks as follows:

1. Right-click on the speaker icon in the system tray in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and choose Playback devices.

2. Right-click on the playback device that has the green tick next to it and choose Properties.

3. Click Advanced.

4. Untick any options in the Exclusive Mode box then click OK > OK > OK.

Solve problems with DVD playback in Media Player in Windows 7

If you find that DVD playback in Media Player is jerky and skips a lot while using your laptop, the problem can have an unlikely source: the power management settings. It is due to the power management settings being configured to save battery life, meaning that not enough power is available for DVD playback. To solve the problem, you need to configure your power settings to support video playback – this will mean that playback is problem free, but your battery will run down a little faster. To apply the fix:

1. Click Start > Control Panel > Power Options.

2. Click Change Plan Settings for your selected plan.

3. Click Change Advanced Settings.

4. Expand the Multimedia Settings option, then set When Playing a Video to Optimize Video Quality.

5. Click OK.

Quickly launch a new program instance in Windows 7

If you need to quickly open a new instance of a program, Windows 7 provides a handy shortcut – simply click on the taskbar icon of the program using the middle mouse button (some mice have the middle button integrated with the mouse wheel, you’ll need to click the wheel instead). If you don’t have a three button mouse, or are using a laptop track pad for example, you can still simulate middle button clicks by holding down [Shift] and left-clicking. The middle click also helps you quickly close down programs: simply hover your mouse over the program’s icon in the taskbar to bring up the Aero preview window, then middle-click on the red cross icon to close the program.

Change the Default Windows Explorer Location in Windows 7

When you open Windows Explorer in Windows 7, by default it will open to the Libraries folder. However, if you don’t use this new Windows feature, it can be a bit annoying to then have to find your way to your Documents folder. Fortunately you can easily change the folder that Windows Explorer opens to by default, simply by following the steps below:

1. Click Start > All Programs > Accessories, right-click on Windows Explorer and click Properties.

2. Click the Shortcut tab.

3. Replace the text in the Target field with: %windir%\​explorer.exe ::{450D8FBA-AD25-11D0-98A8-0800361B1103}

4. Click OK.

Essential tip to enable Aero in Windows 7/Vista

If you reinstall Windows 7 or Vista, or buy a brand new PC, you may find that the Aero interface is not enabled by default, even if you have the correct graphics driver installed. If this is the case, then you need to run the System Rating tool, which Windows uses to check that your PC can actually support Aero. This tip will also help if you have just installed a new graphics card too.  To do so, follow these steps:

1. Right-click on Computer and choose Properties.

2. Click the link System rating is not available.

3. Click Rate this computer. The rating process can take some time, but when it is complete, Aero should be enabled.

Disable Run As in Windows XP to Boost Security

The Run As feature in Windows XP is a useful time saver. If you are logged in to an account without administrative privileges and need to run a program as an administrator – to access it you simply need to right-click on a program icon and choose Run As. But, if your PC has any accounts without passwords set, a malicious user (including a hacker who gains access to your PC) can use the Run As feature to launch applications as other users, which can pose a major security problem if those users have administrative privileges.  To get around this problem you can disable Run As by applying this registry tweak. First backup your registry following the steps in article R 11 of your main Windows Advisor manual, or here: http://www.windowsadvisor.co.uk/reg_backup.html

Then:

1. Press [Windows Key] + [R], type REGEDIT and click OK.

2. Navigate to the registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\​SOFTWARE\​Microsoft\​Windows\​CurrentVersion\​policies\​Explorer. If the Explorer subkey doesn’t exist, create it by right-clicking on policies and choosing New > Key. 

3. Right-click in a blank area in the right-hand panel and choose New > DWORD Value. Name the new value HideRunAsVerb

4. Double-click HideRunAsVerb and change the Value data field to 1.

5. Click OK, close the registry editor and restart your PC for the changes to take effect.

Use a new Windows 7 feature to quickly search the Internet

The Windows 7 search facility allows you to perform detailed searches for files stored on both your local machine and other computers connected to your network. However, by adding a small extension, you can even use the search facility to search the Internet from your desktop without opening a web browser, and view the search results as if they were local files on your PC. These extensions, called Search Connectors, exist for many popular websites, such as Google News, Flickr and Amazon. To add the Search Connector for Wikipedia, follow these steps:

1. Download the Windows Search Connector pack from: http://tiny.cc/dQzgX

2. Unzip the downloaded file and double-click on Wikipedia.osdx

3. When prompted, click Add.

4. The Wikipedia search option will now be displayed in the left-hand panel of Windows Explorer, under the Favorites heading. Simply click on this option and enter your search term to search Wikipedia. The results will be displayed in the main Windows Explorer window.

Hint: You can add the other Search Connectors included in the Search Connector pack you downloaded to search other websites.

Show the menu bar in Internet Explorer 7 and 8

Internet Explorer 7 and 8 both offer significant security improvements over older versions, but they have one thing missing. The main menu bar is no longer shown by default, making it tricky to access lots of the functionality contained in those menus. Fortunately there is a way to get the menu bar back, by applying this trick:

1. Right-click on a blank area of the toolbar at the top of the Internet Explorer window.

2. Choose Menu Bar from the pop-up menu.

3. The menu bar will now permanently display at the top of the Internet Explorer window.

Hint: if you don’t want to permanently display the menu bar, just press the [Alt] key to temporarily display it.

Quickly switch to your Temp directory in any Windows version

The Windows temporary directory is used by Windows components to store data that will only be needed for a short time. But did you know that you can use it too, to store data that you only need for a short time, such as documents downloaded from the Internet which you don’t need to keep. The advantage of using the temporary directory is that its contents are automatically cleared by the Windows Disk Cleanup tool, meaning that you don’t waste unnecessary hard disk space with files that you have downloaded and forgotten about. However, locating the temporary directory can be tricky, as its location has changed on every Windows version. Thankfully, there is a quick way to locate the temporary directory, regardless of your Windows version:

1. Press [Windows Key] + [R].

2. Type %TEMP% and press [Enter].

3. The temporary directory will open in Windows Explorer.

Easily switch between displays in Windows 7

If you’ve ever tried to connect an unfamiliar Windows laptop to a projector, to give a PowerPoint presentation for example, you may have struggled to find the right key combination to send the laptop’s video signal to the projector. This can even be a problem on desktop PCs that are connected to multiple monitors; you usually press a function key plus one of the [F] keys. Microsoft have recognized that the lack of consistency between PC manufacturers is a problem, so Windows 7 features a quick shortcut that allows you to switch between displays in a standard way:

1. Press [Windows Key] + [R].

2. At the command prompt type: DisplaySwitch and press [Enter].

3. Use the display switcher tool to choose the display configuration that you want and click OK.

Alternatively, the key combination [Windows Key] + [P] will open the display switcher on any Windows 7 machine.

Note: You will need to have the Aero interface enabled to be able to use this feature.

If you are having problems installing Windows 7, be sure to read article ‘W71 – Windows 7: Essential Steps for an Error-free Installation’ from Windows Advisor update 7. If you’re not currently a Windows Advisor subscriber, you can sign up for a free 6-week trial here: http://www.windowsadvisor.co.uk.

Windows 7 Less Secure than Previously Thought

With Windows 7 having only just hit the shelves, and with many PC users who put off upgrading to Vista thinking of getting a new Windows 7 machine for Christmas, the latest news from Sophos Labs is not good. Sophos, an Internet security firm with their own anti-virus software, have conducted some tests on Windows 7 and found that it is vulnerable to 80% of the viruses experienced by earlier versions of Windows, such as Vista and XP. The Windows 7 machine that they tested didn’t have any anti-virus software installed, so it seems that this version of Windows is just as reliant on third-party security software as previous Windows versions.

If you’ve upgraded to Windows 7 already, you will of course have to install anti-virus software, such as the free AVG tool that featured on the Windows Advisor manual CD. You can also give your system security a boost by disabling harmful ActiveX controls in Internet Explorer that can be used to install malicious software on your PC. If you are a Windows Advisor subscriber, update 9 will bring you article T70 to show you how to take control of harmful ActiveX controls and secure your PC. If you’re not currently a Windows Advisor subscriber, you can sign up for a free 6-week trial here: http://www.windowsadvisor.co.uk.

Windows 7 features that help make everyday tasks easier

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